Read a German article quoting a politician or an official, and a verb here and there looks almost right but not quite: "er habe gesagt" instead of the "er hat gesagt" an app course drilled into you, or "die Firma sei betroffen" instead of "die Firma ist betroffen." Nothing about the sentence looks broken, and a dictionary lookup on the verb won't explain the ending. This is Konjunktiv I, a verb form German journalism reaches for specifically, and near-exclusively, when reporting what someone else said.
What this verb shift is actually signaling
Konjunktiv I marks reported speech: the writer is repeating a claim, not vouching for it. "Der Minister sagte, die Reform sei notwendig" (the minister said the reform was necessary) uses "sei" instead of the indicative "ist" specifically to keep the sentence's truth value separate from the journalist's own. This isn't doubt, hedging, or disbelief the way an English "allegedly" implies skepticism; it's a neutral, almost mechanical convention German print journalism applies to any quoted or paraphrased statement, confirmed or not. A sentence written entirely in Konjunktiv I is standard, professional distancing, not a red flag about the source.
Spotting the form
Konjunktiv I takes the verb stem and adds a distinct set of endings: -e, -est, -e, -en, -et, -en, applied uniformly whether the verb is regular or irregular. "Sein" (to be) becomes sei, seist, sei, seien, seiet, seien, which is why "sei" shows up constantly in reported claims about someone's state or situation. Weak verbs like "sagen" (to say) produce "er sage," a form that looks almost identical to the present indicative "er sagt" except for that single -e, which is exactly why it's easy to read past without noticing the mood has shifted.
A worked example, clause by clause
A real sentence shows the mechanism better than a rule does: "Die Polizei teilte mit, der Verdächtige sei am Montag festgenommen worden, er habe die Tat jedoch bestritten" (police stated the suspect had been arrested on Monday, but he had denied the act). Both verbs carrying the police's account, "sei... festgenommen worden" and "habe... bestritten," sit in Konjunktiv I. Nothing here tells you whether the arrest actually happened on Monday or whether the denial is credible; both clauses are flagged, identically, as things police said, not things the article is confirming independently. If the next sentence switched to plain indicative, "Der Mann sitzt seit Dienstag in Untersuchungshaft" (the man has been in pretrial detention since Tuesday), that shift signals the outlet treating the detention itself as an independently verified fact, not just part of the police account.
English handles the same distinction with a reporting verb and no verb-mood shift at all: "police said the suspect was arrested," with "was arrested" staying in ordinary past tense throughout, so the only signal that this is someone else's claim is the word "said" at the front of the sentence. German instead marks every clause inside the reported statement, however long it runs, which is exactly why a multi-clause German quote keeps shifting into Konjunktiv I well past the point an English sentence would have dropped the reporting frame entirely.
Why German falls back to Konjunktiv II mid-article
For many regular verbs, the third-person singular Konjunktiv I ending collides with the ordinary present indicative and becomes indistinguishable, and for most verbs the first- and third-person plural forms are identical to the indicative outright. When that collision would make the reported-speech marking invisible, German substitutes Konjunktiv II instead, the same subjunctive form used in conditionals: "sie hätten," "sie würden," "sie kämen." A news article can shift between Konjunktiv I and Konjunktiv II within the same paragraph purely to keep the reported-speech signal visible, not because the certainty of the claim changed partway through. Recognizing that the substitution is grammatical housekeeping, not a meaning shift, prevents misreading a stylistic patch as a change in how confident the source sounds.
The other place it appears: reported questions
Konjunktiv I isn't limited to reported statements. It shows up just as often in reported questions, usually introduced by "ob" (whether) or a question word like "wie" or "warum": "Die Behörde prüft, ob die Zahlen korrekt seien" (the authority is checking whether the figures are correct). Here the mood applies to the disputed claim itself, "the figures are correct," which is exactly the thing under investigation, not yet confirmed either way. Learners who've only met Konjunktiv I in direct quotation ("er sagte, sie sei...") can miss it entirely in this construction, because there's no visible speaker attached the way there is with "sagte" or "erklärte"; the reporting frame is a verb like "prüfen" (to examine) or "untersuchen" (to investigate) rather than a verb of speaking, but the mood is doing the identical job of marking the claim as unresolved.
What this changes about how you should read a quote
Because the marking is close to universal in professional German reporting, its presence tells you almost nothing on its own, but its absence does. A sentence that drops into the plain indicative inside an otherwise Konjunktiv-marked passage is the article's own voice stepping in, either to state something as independently verified fact or to summarize context rather than relay a claim. Tracking that shift, reported claim in Konjunktiv, verified fact in the indicative, lets you separate what a source asserted from what the outlet is willing to state outright, a distinction that's easy to lose if you're reading Konjunktiv I forms as slightly broken indicative verbs rather than as a deliberate signal doing real work in the sentence.
That distinction matters most in exactly the articles where it appears most densely: coverage of a dispute, a court case, or a political disagreement, where multiple parties are quoted making conflicting claims in the same piece. An article reporting three officials' competing accounts entirely in Konjunktiv I is treating all three as equally unverified relayed claims; the moment one clause drops into the indicative, the writer is telling you that particular detail is being stated as settled, not just repeated.